Ethics as Conservation Laws

When comparing cultures through GRIN metrics, there is a risk of reducing societies to productivity engines. This is where morality and ethics enter - not as afterthoughts, but as integral components of survival.

Morality as Conserved Memetic Wisdom

We propose that ethics and morality are deeply conserved heuristics evolved through millennia of trial and error. Long before philosophy or theology, human groups encoded warnings against collapse into their shared stories and rules.

In small bands of Homo erectus and early Homo sapiens, elders and grandmothers recognized recurring survival traps:

• Hoarding food led to group starvation
• Uncontrolled violence decimated clans
• Ignoring seasonal cycles destroyed the resource base
• Betraying kin fractured the cooperation that enabled survival

Groups that failed to regulate these behaviors collapsed. Groups that codified warnings into moral guidance endured. Over generations, those lessons solidified into taboos, rituals, and ethical systems.

The Function of Morality

Morality acts as a stability regulator on the innovation-resilience frontier:

• Rules like "don't kill," "don't lie," "share food," and "respect elders" suppress destructive novelty while still permitting constructive ΔK
• They prevent runaway collapse at existential choke points
• They do not maximize G directly, but they prevent catastrophic collapses in R

Cultures that ignored this balance - maximizing innovation without resilience, or resilience without innovation - often collapsed. Cultures that carried forward robust ethical heuristics were more likely to survive shocks and persist.

Historical Examples as Anti-Collapse Heuristics

Hebrew dietary laws (Kashrut): Constrained food choices reduced disease transmission in pre-germ-theory environments. Morally encoded hygiene raised survival R.

Buddhist monastic codes (Vinaya): Strict rules regulated hierarchy, sex, and property. These stabilized resilient knowledge communities across centuries, protecting transmission fidelity F.

Christian charity and almsgiving: Encoded redistribution ensured the poor remained within the community, reducing collapse from inequality shocks. Raised systemic R.

Islamic zakat: Mandatory wealth transfer created social safety nets that increased community resilience to economic shocks.

The Synthesis

Morality is the memetic echo of our ancestors' sensitivity analysis: lived warnings encoded in culture to avoid existential choke points.

This does not mean all traditional morality is correct, or that we cannot improve on inherited rules. It means we should approach moral traditions with humility - they often encode hard-won survival wisdom that is not immediately obvious.

GRIN gives us tools to evaluate which moral rules still serve their function and which have become obsolete or counterproductive. The goal is not to discard ethics but to understand them more deeply.